


somebody else already used the word aurora borealis

by cosmicpoet



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Meta, pregame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-03-31
Packaged: 2019-12-27 03:54:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18296318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmicpoet/pseuds/cosmicpoet
Summary: Shirogane crafts the storyline of Momota and Harukawa, convincing herself that if anything is real, it's this. It's all of this.





	somebody else already used the word aurora borealis

The best part of all of this is how easily she could crush the moulding clay into nothingness, as if her hands are powerful, like a hydraulic press or God. There’s not much difference between the two once you claim to know what a creator is, in the inherent tear of the line between creation and destruction. Frankenstein-esque abandonment, parasitic, clings to authenticity and speaks of things like _mainstream_ and _marketing_ and _these plastic dolls will fall in love because I will make them fall in love because their hands are my hands and fuck it, I say so._

Shirogane treats them like porcelain, even though they have not yet been - nor will they be - fired in a kiln. They’re tools to everyone else, storyboard people who exist in three dimensions only because the budget allowed for it; but to her, oh, her foolish eyes see a personal responsibility to the inanimate, a Deistic view of nothingness until it washes away and takes her fame with it. Even the colour schemes match - red and purple, she’s stripped her own personal contusions from her skin and given them life, said _take this, all of you, and eat it like static._

So they will fall in love. And now, she must decide which of them is to die. The bundles of notes next to her, hastily scrawled on paper rather than efficiently typed up, speak testament to her own shady grasp on authenticity. She has the same falsity within her as people who hang vinyl records up on their walls or pretend to have gone to concerts in far away cities. And the stories they tell are the only real thing in the room, having not happened, but not happened _yet._ It’s said that if you give a monkey a typewriter and an infinite amount of time, it will, eventually, churn out the entire works of Shakespeare. Whilst ridiculous, it is also true. As is infinity. As always has been infinity.

Shirogane just wants to lay claim to her part in all of this.

People will tell her that the love between these crude human depictions made of moulding clay is not real, but she’ll just laugh her mirror-perfected laugh. If this is true, then nothing is real. The people who speak out against the injustice of imperfection are the most dishonest with themselves, fools who will not admit that denying a role does not give them autonomy over the lines that have been predestined for them to spit. Not all creators want to be worshipped. Some, the beautiful ones, the bright ones, the ones who grapple with infinity and think they can actually win, want to be hated, because it means there’s just enough free will in this whole damn affair to put on a show. And what’s to say that stories aren’t real? How many layers of reality do we exist on, anyway? Just because we can’t perceive something, doesn’t negate its existence.

She likens this to hallucinations. If something can be seen, but not touched, does it make it non-existent, or merely existing _only_ on the plane of sight? And if something can be felt, does it matter if it was written on a script months before it tried to claim authenticity? And if so, is she even at fault? She’s never pretended to be authentic, in fact, she’s a slick body of flesh and ideas that she knows are only true in certain lights. It’s the half-life of half-lies, and she loves it. Anyone who doesn’t will only fall victim to becoming moulding clay.

So, the purple one will die. Bruises are red at first, and that’s when they hurt. They only turn purple when, like a wounded animal, they have nothing to do but die, and then it all becomes a game of burning so bright in the last few moments that they will be remembered. There will be orchestrated heartbreak, with Shirogane herself as the shadow-conductor. It will be _glorious._ Death itself is universal; it comes to all of us. Sometimes, it sneaks up on us in the night - we go to sleep with plans for the morning, never considering that we may not wake up. Sometimes, it bursts like blood vessels, and chokes last words out of those who never gave thought to the poetic until it became the only virtue of the dying.

Without love, death would be a spectacle without meaning. Shirogane plays herself as the Lady of Shalott, weaving, watching the world through the mirror until she can become her very own Lancelot. Is this about her? It’s either all or nothing - she can die as an author or live as a character, with literary criticism damned into meaninglessness. Rewriting the rules is how she wants to play this game until the inevitable checkmate. And will she sacrifice her queen too early? Will she rely on this - the bishop and the knight - the irreparable love story fashioned from the mind to the drawing board to the audience? When should she take her bow? _Should_ she take her bow?

She puts the two dolls back into the pile, making a total of sixteen, all mangled limbs and rough concepts. The temptation to push her hands into the clay proves too great, and in reckless finality, she does so, until the figures are merely mumbles of originality in a pile of ideas and stereotypes and laws that have been put in place by her superiors at Team Danganronpa. There are things she can break, things she can convince herself are done intentionally, but the colours of the clay distort and warp like they’re breathing, like walls after LSD, and she has to turn away.

And then she has to remember that her legs are made of flesh and bone and muscle and humanity, and she must walk from her small, back-room office, down the hallway lined with photographs of masterminds in the same outfit, reaching the place where the higher-ups convince themselves that the true decisions are made.

With authority in her voice, she speaks.

“I have the plans drafted for Momota and Harukawa’s storyline.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title from 'Gallons of Rubbing Alcohol Flow Through the Strip' by Nirvana.


End file.
